50-412: The Fairy-Queen (1692; Purcell catalogue number Z.629) is a semi-opera by Henry Purcell ; a " Restoration spectacular ". The libretto is an anonymous adaptation of William Shakespeare 's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream . First performed in 1692, The Fairy-Queen was composed three years before Purcell's death at the age of 35. Following his death, the score was lost and only rediscovered early in
100-618: A British composer , conductor, and author . He was the founder and music director of the Royal Ballet , and (alongside Dame Ninette de Valois and Sir Frederick Ashton ) he was a major figure in the establishment of the English ballet as a significant artistic movement. His ballet commitments, including extensive conducting work throughout his life, restricted his compositional activities. However one work, The Rio Grande , for chorus, orchestra and piano soloist, achieved widespread popularity in
150-469: A growing interest in Baroque music and the rise of the countertenor, led by pioneers such as Alfred Deller and Russell Oberlin . The former movement led to performances of long-neglected composers such as Purcell, John Dowland , John Blow and even George Frideric Handel , while the latter complemented it by providing a way of making such performances as authentic as possible as regards the original music and
200-468: A guest conductor until shortly before his death in 1951. An expert on painting, sculpture, and literature as well as music, Lambert differed from most of his fellow English composers of the time in his perception of the importance of jazz. He responded positively to the music of Duke Ellington . His embrace of music outside the 'serious' repertoire is illustrated by his book Music Ho! (1934), subtitled "a study of music in decline", which remains one of
250-484: A length of four hours. The decision to curtail the play is usually taken together with the resolution to modernise to such an extent that the cohesion between music, text and action sketched above is entirely lost, a criticism levelled at the English National Opera 's 1995 production directed by David Pountney . The production was released on video the same year, and revived by the company in 2002. A bold approach
300-516: A poem by Sacheverell Sitwell . It achieved considerable success, and Lambert made two recordings of the piece as conductor (1930 and 1949). He had a great interest in African-American music , and once said that he would have ideally liked The Rio Grande to feature a black choir. He held a very positive view of jazz rhythms and their incorporation in classical music saying once that: "The chief interest of jazz rhythms lies in their application to
350-728: A woman who sings the well-known "The Plaint" ("O let me weep"). A Chinese man and woman enter singing several songs about the joys of their world. ("Thus, the gloomy world", "Thus happy and free" and "Yes, Xansi"). Two other Chinese women summon Hymen, who sings in praise of married bliss, thus uniting the wedding theme of A Midsummer Night's Dream , with the celebration of William and Mary's anniversary. Audio Video Notes Sources Semi-opera The terms " semi-opera ", " dramatic[k] opera " and " English opera " were all applied to Restoration entertainments that combined spoken plays with masque -like episodes employing singing and dancing characters. They usually included machines in
400-697: The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by William Christie was repeated later that month at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms . In June 2016, the opera was performed by the Hungarian State Opera , in a new, neo-noir production directed by András Almási-Tóth [ hu ] The role of Mopsa was originally performed by a soprano; however, a later revision by Purcell stated that it
450-646: The Queen's Theatre, Dorset Garden in London by the United Company . The author or at least co-author of the libretto was presumably Thomas Betterton , the manager of Dorset Garden Theatre, with whom Purcell worked regularly. This belief is based on an analysis of Betterton's stage directions. A collaboration between several playwrights is also feasible. Choreography for the various dances was provided by Josias Priest , who also worked on Dioclesian and King Arthur , and who
500-407: The 1920s, and is still regularly performed today. His other work includes a jazz influenced Piano Concerto (1931), major ballet scores such as Horoscope (1937) and a full-scale choral masque Summer's Last Will and Testament (1936) that some consider his masterpiece. Lambert had wide-ranging interests beyond music, as can be seen from his critical study Music Ho! (1934), which places music in
550-478: The 20th century and several of its arias, including "The Plaint" ("O let me weep"), have become popular recital pieces. In July 2009, in celebration of the 350th anniversary of Purcell's birth, The Fairy-Queen was performed by Glyndebourne Festival Opera using a new edition of the score, prepared for the Purcell Society by Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock. The Fairy-Queen was first performed on 2 May 1692 at
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#1733093222242600-576: The Sonata features a blues in rondo form. The Concerto's unusual chamber scoring becomes something of a hybrid between a jazz band and the ensemble used in Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire . Lambert was appointed in 1931 as conductor and music director of the Vic-Wells ballet (later The Royal Ballet ), but his career as a composer stagnated. His major choral work Summer's Last Will and Testament (1935, after
650-463: The Sydney-born, Brisbane -trained Arthur Benjamin to play the solo part. Despite his disapproval of homosexuality he formed a good working relationship with Benjamin's fellow Australian Robert Helpmann . Afterwards he entrusted yet another Australian musician, Gordon Watson , with the task of playing the virtuoso piano part at the première of his last ballet, Tiresias . Lambert's first marriage
700-575: The action in the play during that particular act in a metaphorical way. In this manner we have Night and Sleep in act 2, which is apt as that act of the play consists of Oberon's plans to use the power of the " love-in-idleness " flower to confuse various loves, and it is therefore appropriate for the allegorical figures of Secrecy, Mystery et al. to usher in a night of enchantment. The masque for Bottom in act 3 includes metamorphoses, songs of both real and feigned love, and beings who are not what they seem. The Reconciliation masque between Oberon and Titania at
750-429: The audience were taking their seats. The "Act Tunes" are played between acts, as the curtain was normally raised at the beginning of a performance and not lowered until the end. After act 1, each act commences with a short symphony (3–5 minutes). The English tradition of semi-opera, to which The Fairy-Queen belongs, demanded that most of the music within the play be introduced through the agency of supernatural beings,
800-475: The ballet scores Horoscope (1938) and Tiresias (1951) - though there were also several smaller works, such as the white-note piano four hands suite Trois pièces nègres pour les touches blanches , written for the identical twin piano duo Mary and Geraldine Peppin . Instead he concentrated mostly on conducting, working closely with the Royal Ballet until his resignation in 1947. He continued to be featured as
850-430: The broader success of his next ballet (the neo-classical Pomona of 1927, choreographed again by Nijinska), and through his participation as narrator in many public performances (and a recording) of William Walton and Edith Sitwell 's controversial Façade . Lambert's best-known composition followed. The Rio Grande (1927), for piano and alto soloists, chorus , and orchestra of brass, strings and percussion, sets
900-455: The clarions") makes it seem more probable that for this work falsettists were employed. For a list of non-singing characters see A Midsummer Night's Dream , with the exception of Hippolyta, who was removed by Purcell's librettist. For the plot of the play see A Midsummer Night's Dream . Only a synopsis of scenes provided with music is given here. The first scene set to music occurs after Titania has left Oberon, following an argument over
950-431: The composer's intentions (less true for Handel, where countertenors appear as castrati replacements). This has led to The Fairy-Queen's increased popularity, and numerous recordings have been made, often using period instruments. The format of the work presents problems to modern directors, who must decide whether or not to present Purcell's music as part of the original play, which uncut is rather lengthy. Savage calculated
1000-487: The context of the other arts. His friends included John Maynard Keynes , Anthony Powell and the Sitwells . To Keynes, Lambert was perhaps the most brilliant man he had ever met; to de Valois he was the greatest ballet conductor and advisor his country had ever had; to the composer Denis ApIvor he was the most entertaining personality of the musical world. The son of Australian painter George Lambert and his wife Amy, and
1050-421: The development of diabetes that remained undiagnosed and untreated until very late in his life. Lambert's childhood experiences (which included a near-fatal bout of septicaemia) had given him a lifelong detestation and fear of the medical profession. Lambert himself considered he had failed as a composer, and completed only two major works after the disappointment of Summer's Last Will and Testament - they were
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#17330932222421100-409: The echoing air" have entered the discographic repertory of many singers outside their original context. The orchestra for The Fairy-Queen consists of two recorders , two oboes , two trumpets, timpani, string instruments and harpsichord continuo . Following Purcell's premature death, his opera Dioclesian remained popular until well into the eighteenth century, but the score of The Fairy-Queen
1150-506: The end of act 4 prefigures the final masque. The scene changes to a Garden of Fountains, denoting King William's hobby, just after Oberon says "bless these Lovers' Nuptial Day". The Four Seasons tell us that the marriage here celebrated is a good one all year round and "All Salute the rising Sun"/...The Birthday of King Oberon". The kings of England were traditionally likened to the sun (Oberon = William. Significantly, William and Mary were married on his birthday, 4 November.). The Chinese scene in
1200-527: The exception being pastoral or drunken characters. All the masques in The Fairy-Queen are presented by Titania or Oberon. Originally act 1 contained no music, but due to the work's enormous success it was revived in 1693, when Purcell added the scene of the Drunken Poet and two further songs later on in the work; "Ye gentle spirits of the air" and "The Plaint". As noted above, each masque is subtly related to
1250-552: The final masque is in homage to Queen Mary's famous collection of china. The garden shown above it and the exotic animals bring King William back into the picture and Hymen's song in praise of their marriage, plus the stage direction bringing (Mary's) china vases containing (William's) orange trees to the front of the stage complete the symbolism. Written as he approached the end of his brief career, The Fairy-Queen contains some of Purcell's finest theatre music, as musicologists have agreed for generations. In particular, Constant Lambert
1300-612: The late fifteenth-century composers than any music since." Lambert was to take his interest in jazz much further in works such as the Piano Sonata (1929) and the Concerto for piano and nine Instruments (1931), where the style moves away from the "symphonic jazz" of Gershwin and Paul Whiteman to something much more tense and urban, with popular and formal elements of composition closely integrated, rhythms jagged and extreme, and harmony sometimes approaching atonalism. The second movement of
1350-554: The librettist, due to an error in his 1910 biography. The fairies mock the drunken poet and drive him away. With its quick repartee and its broadly "realistic" portrayal of the poor victim, the Masque of the Drunken Poet is the closest episode in Purcell's London stage works to full-fledged opera as the Italians knew it. It begins after Oberon has ordered Puck to anoint the eyes of Demetrius with
1400-401: The love-juice. Titania and her fairies merrily revel ("Come all ye songsters of the sky"), and Night ("See, even Night"), Mystery ("Mystery's song"), Secrecy ("One charming night") and Sleep ("Hush, no more, be silent all") lull them asleep and leave them to pleasant dreams. Titania has fallen in love with Bottom (now equipped with his ass' head), much to Oberon's gratification. A Nymph sings of
1450-618: The manner of the restoration spectacular . The first examples were the Shakespeare adaptations produced by Thomas Betterton with music by Matthew Locke . After Locke's death, a second flowering produced the semi-operas of Henry Purcell , notably King Arthur and The Fairy-Queen . Semi-opera received a deathblow when the Lord Chamberlain separately licensed plays without music and the new Italian opera . Semi-operas were performed with singing, speaking and dancing roles. When music
1500-514: The most part it is a masque of the god Phoebus ("When the cruel winter") and the Four Seasons (Spring; "Thus, the ever grateful spring", Summer; "Here's the Summer", Autumn; "See my many coloured fields", and Winter; "Now Winter comes slowly"). After Theseus has been told of the lovers' adventures in the wood, it begins with the goddess Juno singing an epithalamium , "Thrice happy lovers", followed by
1550-410: The ownership of a little Indian boy. Two of her fairies sing of the delights of the countryside ("Come, come, come, come, let us leave the town"). A drunken, stuttering poet enters, singing "Fill up the bowl". The stuttering has led many to believe the scene is based on the habits of Thomas d'Urfey . However, it may also be poking fun at Elkanah Settle , who stuttered as well and was long thought to be
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1600-530: The pianist Angus Morrison , conductor Guy Warrack , Thomas Armstrong (a future head of the Royal Academy of Music ), and the composers Gavin Gordon , Patrick Hadley and Gordon Jacob . In 1925 (at the age of 20) he received a high profile commission to write a ballet for Sergei Diaghilev 's Ballets Russes ( Roméo et Juliette , 1926, choreographed by Nijinska ). For a few years he enjoyed celebrity, through
1650-433: The play of the same name by Thomas Nashe ), one of his most emotionally dark works, proved unfashionable in the mood following the death of King George V , but Alan Frank hailed it at the time as Lambert's "finest work". The Second World War took its toll on his vitality and creativity. He was ruled unfit for active service in the armed forces; decades of hard drinking had impaired his health, which declined further with
1700-496: The play. Recent scholarship has shown that the opera, which ends with a masque featuring Hymen, the God of Marriage, was composed for the fifteenth wedding anniversary of William III and Mary II . Growing interest in Baroque music and the rise of the countertenor contributed to the work's re-entry into the repertoire. The opera received several full-length recordings in the latter part of
1750-459: The pleasures and torments of love ("If love's a sweet passion") and after several dances, Titania and Bottom are entertained by the foolish, loving banter of two haymakers, Corydon and Mopsa. It begins after Titania has been freed from her enchantment, commencing with a brief divertissement to celebrate Oberon's birthday ("Now the Night", and the abovementioned "Let the fifes and the clarions"), but for
1800-406: The rise of Italian opera and the attendant castrati . After that Romantic opera emerged, with the attendant predominance of the tenor . Until the early music revival, the male alto survived mainly in the ecclesiastical tradition of all-male church choirs and twentieth-century American vocal quartets. However, Purcell's music (and with it The Fairy-Queen ) was resuscitated by two related movements:
1850-436: The setting of words, and although jazz settings have by no means the flexibility or subtlety of the early seventeenth-century airs, for example, there is no denying their lightness and ingenuity … English words demand for their successful musical treatment an infinitely more varied and syncopated rhythm than is to be found in the nineteenth-century romantics, and the best jazz songs of today are, in fact, nearer in their methods to
1900-412: The top) and tessitura (known sometimes as an haute-contre , the descendants of the contratenors alti of medieval polyphony ) or a falsettist . It seems that throughout his career he used both. However, purely for reasons of dramatic verisimilitude, it is more likely than not that the travesty role of Mopsa was taken by a falsettist, and the presence of a duet for two male altos ("Let the fifes and
1950-451: The twentieth century. Purcell did not set any of Shakespeare's text to music; instead he composed music for short masques in every act but the first. The play itself was also slightly modernised in keeping with seventeenth-century dramatic conventions, but in the main the spoken text is as Shakespeare wrote it. The masques are related to the play metaphorically, rather than literally. Many critics have stated that they bear no relationship to
2000-476: The wittiest, if most highly opinionated, volumes of music criticism in the English language. Lambert's father, while born in Russia and of American heritage, viewed himself as first and foremost an Australian. Constant was always conscious of his Australian connections, although he never visited that country. For the first performance of his Piano Concerto (1931), rather than select a British-born pianist, Lambert chose
2050-614: The younger brother of Maurice Lambert , Constant Lambert was educated at Christ's Hospital near Horsham in West Sussex. While still a boy he demonstrated formidable musical gifts, and wrote his first orchestral work at the age of 13. In September 1922 Lambert entered the Royal College of Music, where his teachers were Ralph Vaughan Williams , R. O. Morris and Sir George Dyson (composition), Malcolm Sargent (conducting) and Herbert Fryer (piano). His contemporaries there included
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2100-626: Was a dancer and cigarette girl at the Shim Sham Club in Wardour Street, Soho. Their affair lasted until his untimely death in 1951. Close friends of his included Michael Ayrton , Sacheverell Sitwell and Anthony Powell . He was the prototype of the character Hugh Moreland in Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time , particularly in the fifth volume, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant , in which Moreland
2150-420: Was a great admirer; from it he arranged a suite and in collaboration with Edward Dent arranged the work to form the then new Covent Garden opera company's first postwar production. It shows to excellent effect Purcell's complete mastery of the pungent English style of Baroque counterpoint, as well as displaying his absorption of Italian influences. Several arias such as "The Plaint", "Thrice happy lovers" and "Hark!
2200-483: Was a principal dancer. After divorcing Kaye, in 1947 Lambert married the artist Isabel Delmer , who designed the stage sets and costumes for his ballet Tiresias ; after his death, she married Alan Rawsthorne . In 1945 Florence married Charles Edward Peter Hole; their daughter Anne later took the stage name Annie Lambert . During the 1930s Lambert also had a long affair and friendship with Laureen Goodare (mother of actress Cleo Sylvestre , Constant's goddaughter). Laureen
2250-469: Was associated with Dido and Aeneas . A letter describing the original performance shows that the parts of Titania and Oberon were played by children of eight or nine. Presumably other fairies were also played by children; this affects our perspective on the staging. Following the huge success of his operas Dioclesian (1690) and King Arthur (1691), Purcell composed The Fairy-Queen in 1692. Purcell's "First" and "Second Music" were played while
2300-404: Was lost and only rediscovered early in the twentieth century. Other works like it fell into obscurity. Changing tastes were not the only reason for this; the voices employed had also become difficult to find. The list of singers below shows the frequent employment of the male alto, or countertenor , in the semi-opera, a voice which, after Purcell, essentially vanished from the stage, probably due to
2350-530: Was taken at the Brazilian Opera Company's 2000 staging by Luiz Päetow , with the libretto becoming unstuck in time. In July 2009, two months before the 350th anniversary of Purcell's birth, The Fairy-Queen was performed in a new edition, prepared for The Purcell Society by Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock, which restored the entire theatrical entertainment as well as the original pitch used by Purcell. The performance by Glyndebourne Festival Opera with
2400-500: Was to Florence Kaye, on 5 August 1931; their son was Kit Lambert , one of the managers of The Who , named after his friend the painter Christopher "Kit" Wood . But he was soon engaged in an on-and-off affair with the ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn . According to friends of Fonteyn, Lambert was the great love of her life and she despaired when she finally realised he would never marry her. Some aspects of this relationship were symbolised in his ballet Horoscope (1938), in which Fonteyn
2450-418: Was to be performed by "Mr. Pate in woman's habit", presumably to have a grotesque effect and highlight the refrain "No, no, no, no, no; no kissing at all" in the dialogue between Corydon and Mopsa. Also, it is not entirely clear what the word " countertenor " means in this context. The record is ambivalent as to whether Purcell (himself a countertenor) used a tenor with a particularly high range (though lighter at
2500-400: Was written, it was usually for moments in the play immediately following either love scenes or those concerning the supernatural. It has been observed that several of Calderón 's comedia s with music by Juan Hidalgo de Polanco are closer to semi-opera than to the pastoral Zarzuela . Constant Lambert Leonard Constant Lambert (23 August 1905 – 21 August 1951) was
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